Rice has been chosen as the model cereal for functional genomics by the international scientific community not only because it is a major global food crop but also because of its small genome, the ease with which it can be transformed, its well understood genetics with detailed genome physical maps and dense molecular markers, and the existence of great similarities in gene sequence, gene structure, gene order and gene function among all the cereals and grasses. Genes identified in rice as being important agronomically are also important in other cereals, and any understanding of rice genes is directly applicable to other cereals.

"Rice has been chosen as the model cereal for functional genomics by the international scientific community not only because it is a major global food crop but also because of its small genome, the ease with which it can be transformed, its well understood genetics with detailed genome physical maps and dense molecular markers, and the existence of great similarities in gene sequence, gene structure, gene order and gene function among all the cereals and grasses. Genes identified in rice as being important agronomically are also important in other cereals, and any understanding of rice genes is directly applicable to other cereals.

Rice Genome Sequence: The Foundation for Understanding the Genetic Systems.- Rice Genome Annotation: Beginnings of Functional Genomics.- Genome-Wide RNA Expression Profiling in Rice.- Rice Proteomics: A Step Toward Functional Analysis of the Rice Genome.- Metabolomics: Enabling Systems-Level Phenotyping in Rice Functional Genomics.- Use of Naturally Occurring Alleles for Crop Improvement.- Chemical- and Irradiation-Induced Mutants and TILLING.- T-DNA Insertion Mutants as a Resource for Rice Functional Genomics.- Transposon Insertional Mutants: A Resource for Rice Functional Genomics.- Gene Targeting by Homologous Recombination for Rice Functional Genomics.- RNA Silencing and Its Application in Functional Genomics.- Activation Tagging Systems in Rice.- Informatics Resources for Rice Functional Genomics.- The Oryza Map Alignment Project (OMAP): A New Resource for Comparative Genome Studies within Oryza.- Application of Functional Genomics Tools for Crop Improvement.- From Rice to Other Cereals: Comparative Genomics.